It’s Roseanne’s America, Not Trump’s

By Christopher Buskirk

Mr. Buskirk is editor and publisher of the journal American Greatness and a contributing opinion writer.

May 15, 2018

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All in the neighborhood.CreditAdam Rose/ABC

The Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor famously advised her coreligionists to push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs,” she wrote. The same could be said of civil society. It is precious, delicate, rare. It requires diligent cultivation.

All the more remarkable is that O’Connor may have found in Roseanne Barr an unlikely ally for her countercultural spirit. The irony is rich — it is hard to imagine O’Connor tuning in Tuesday nights to “Roseanne” (or much of anything else on television these days) — but perhaps in another way it’s unsurprising. Today’s age is one of crude but sharp political division that threatens to devour civil society. Into this maw strides Roseanne, once derided as evidence of a society slouching toward Gomorrah. That was a quarter century ago. Today Roseanne hasn’t changed much but the country has. Enough that her voice — the one that once skirled the national anthem for a cheap laugh — now sounds a felicitous note in a culture full of vindictive political chaos.

The “Roseanne” reboot is transgressive not because it is a pro-Trump show — it isn’t — but because it’s devoid of the ham-fisted agenda politics of so many other shows. Instead, Roseanne does what she’s always done, depicting the lived experience of a big chunk of middle-America: families that disagree on politics and culture but work it out. That resonates with many people because it reflects their own lives. They are concerned primarily with keeping their families together, making ends meet and improving their children’s prospects. Politics only occasionally interjects.

Roseanne’s fictional family, the Conners, lives on the ragged edge economically. They are at the center of a cultural storm that has wreaked havoc on middle- and lower-income Americans, and yet they stick together. These are people who have paid the price for decades of bad policy and worse ideas pushed on them from a political and cultural elite with whom they have increasingly little in common.

The show engages people based on who they are, not how they vote. That’s refreshing and necessary in this hyperpolitical moment, and it demonstrates a rare and welcome humanity. Roseanne is older, her health is increasingly precarious, and the family’s finances are, if anything, more uncertain. The Conners struggle with all kinds of problems for which people often seek political solutions.

Yet the show is not overtly political. That is both its power and its charm. Ideologues will be quick to tease meaning from every plotline, but that misses the point. “Roseanne” is not ideological, offers no policy prescription and endorses no candidate or party. Instead, the show depicts the natural drama of family life and how one American family holds itself together under duress.

The fact that both Roseanne Barr and her character support President Trump is the most remarked upon detail of the show. That a Trump-supporting actor and character is considered transgressive says more about Hollywood and the media that covers it than it does about the rest of the country.

Everyone lives with, works with and is related to people with dramatically different political opinions. And they mostly get along. But that doesn’t find its way into most of the commentary.

This has been my own experience with youth sports. Families from wildly different social and economic backgrounds and with a broad spectrum of conflicting political views get together every weekend for love of the game and the kids that play. In this context, among people who have built friendships and trust, I have had some of the most engaging and encouraging political discussions with people with whom I strongly disagree.

Those discussions would have been impossible without a pre-existing friendship. Ideas matter, but acting upon them requires trust. And that is the essential element most missing from our politics, but not yet from our culture. Building a better American future requires establishing trust. That trust is developed and transmitted primarily through social and cultural institutions.

In a recent episode, Roseanne’s new Muslim neighbors arouse her suspicions. In character she explains, “Anytime something bad happens to somebody, it’s always somebody who lives next door to somebody.” Cue the laugh track. Of course Roseanne is asking us to consider an important question: “Who is my neighbor?” It is the very question asked of Jesus by the lawyer who, we are told, was “seeking to justify himself.” Jesus replied with the parable of the good Samaritan.

Yet neighborhoods as much as nations have customs and traditions they hold in common. They must be nurtured, first in the family and outward from there in the intricate web of natural relationships and structures that constitute civilization. Understanding how best to relate to something new or unusual is fraught under the best of circumstances. But the Conners don’t live under the best of circumstances. Yet Roseanne picks her way forward — without elegance but ultimately with good will. The jokes are all on her.

Some critics have taken Roseanne to task for doing the right thing but only as a result of personal experience, as in the Muslims-next-door episode, where it takes interaction with her new neighbors to convince her that they are a congenial addition to her community. But such criticism is ungenerous. High-trust societies are built on high-trust relationships that are based on personal experience — exactly the process we see Roseanne and her neighbors beginning.

Some may laugh at the idea that lowbrow Roseanne is modeling, at least in part, the humane qualities commended by the British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke. He thought that these highly local, personal relationships were the very fabric of society, that love of “the little platoon” is “the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country, and to mankind.”

A successful nation is a family writ large. Think of civil society as a series of concentric circles, with the family at the center and the complex of nonpolitical and pre-political voluntary associations like sports teams, churches and clubs spreading outward.

Binding them all together are a set of common values, friendships, family bonds — not to mention geographic proximity — that develop a sense of a shared future and even a shared identity.

Let’s have our political differences, even vigorous ones. But let’s do it within the context of mutual trust and shared goals. That’s a tall order, but it’s possible, and much of the heavy lifting will have to be done outside of traditional politics. It means reinvigorating some of our institutions and founding new ones to transmit the basic elements of civilization and social comity.

Are we at war with one another, or can we disagree and still be friends? Believe it or not, the Conner family may point the way forward. Their querulous, precarious, fractious lives and relationships are not so uncommon. And neither is the apparent love they have for one another. Uncomfortable as it may be, America in the early 21st century resembles the Conner family. We can certainly learn from them.

Every day about six million people watch CNN, Fox and MSNBC combined in prime time, but more than 10 million people watched last week’s episode of “Roseanne.” That’s because most Americans live in Roseanne’s America, not President Trump’s. The president gave many people, including Ms. Barr, a sense that he understood their America and that he would give them an opportunity to build a better future.

But it’s still up to the citizens of Roseanne’s America to decide whether we want to restore a society governed by reflection and choice, rather than by accident and force. To do this, we must sublimate our worst political instincts for vindictiveness and division, and reestablish the bonds of family and friendship upon which civil society depends.